The National World War II Museum wants you to take part in a national conversation about food consumed during the war.

Fifteen million soldiers served in World War II, but there were 110 million people on the home front at the time, said the museum's education director, Lauren Handley. The museum has begun to solicit stories of what it was like to cook and eat and deal with all the food problems and adventures in America: using the complex rationing system, making do, raising Victory gardens.

The museum will collect recipes as well, and "probably put together some kind of document that will be free to download on our site," Handley said.

One of the first stories to come in was from Peggy Morgan in Roanoke, Va., who wrote, "During 'The War,' my mother worked in the payroll department at Radford Arsenal in Radford, Va. There was a commissary cart that came around twice a day to the offices with coffee. If they had them, they'd bring snack items, but those were few and far between.

"One day the commissary managed to get hold of a few cartons of Jell-O, and they sent it around on the cart. My mother described the scene when the cart came through the door. Someone spotted it and yelled, 'He's got Jell-O!' The panic that ensued was something like the opening of the doors at Wal-Mart on Black Friday. Workers leapt from desktop to desktop to get to the cart.

"My mother and another woman who worked there had small children, and a man who was among the first to see the Jell-O grabbed two boxes and gave one to each of them. We came to refer to this incident as 'the great Jell-O riot.'¤"

Another one of the first memories sent in was from a soldier who had been a mess captain. He ended up using ice cream powder in the pancakes, which became a favorite.

The food project was inspired by the Knit Your Bit program, in which knitters nationwide made scarves for veterans from the free patterns given out by the museum. It was based on Knitting for Victory, the wartime effort in which millions of people of all ages knitted socks and more for soldiers.

"We've gotten close to 8,000 scarves," Handley said. "As these came in, they kept sending with them things like little stories or just little memories. We were excited about how much it resounded with people who were at home during World War II, or who have the memories from their parents.

"So we were thinking that another great kind of home-front community involvement activity would be to collect stories from the kitchen.

"Not everybody knits, but everybody eats."

Handley and the museum are hoping that those who don't have their own personal memories of the war will participate in "Kitchen Memories" as an oral history project.

"Ideally, it would be a great way to connect generations," Handley said. "It would be great if daughters or sons or granddaughters would go to Lambeth House and do that sharing among generations.

"In my educator heart, I think it would be a great way to connect generations through oral histories and story time."

The museum is doing a good job of getting stories from veterans, she said, but their "very small" research department has their hands full. "We want to be sure we don't lose the home front," Handley said.

Joanne Lamb Hayes, author of "Grandma's Wartime Kitchen: World War II and the Way We Cooked," writes that on the Monday morning after Pearl Harbor, homemakers who remembered food shortages from World War I (when voluntary rationing had not worked) ran to markets and scooped all the sugar from the shelves.

Prices went up, and food rationing began on May 5, 1942, with the "Sugar Book." Eventually, coffee, butter and other fats, canned and frozen goods, and red meat were part of a complicated ration system that changed over the course of the war. (Canned food was rationed not because of the food inside, but because of the metal the cans were made of.)

The government, the food industry and "women's magazines" helped home cooks with Victory menus, which had recipes that used substitutes for things like sugar and "stretched" the recipes, as well as lots of nutrition advice.

The Great Depression years prior to World War II had meant poor nourishment for many families, which in turn affected defense efforts, according to Hayes. Protein, in the form of cooked soybeans and soy flour, was added to many recipes to enrich them.

The following recipes are from her excellent book, and they have added relevance in today's economic climate.

Pork producers kept up with demand during the war; compared to beef, pork could be had for fewer ration points. Beans, of course, were popular.